Liability
Some people have recently been proposing for software developers to be held legally liable for bugs in their products. They claim that until programmers know that they can be sued, they will continue to write insecure or unreliable code.
In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with a given company choosing to accept legal liability for bugs in a given piece of software. That could serve as an effective advertisement method — putting their money where their mouth is. Some companies do that already; for example, QNX with its realtime operating system. What is wrong, however, is to force all programmers to accept liability for their products. Such a move would be bad because:
- Consumers would face much higher prices for all their software (since programmers would pass on the cost of liability insurance, just like doctors pass on the costs of their malpractice insurance to their patients). Of course, they would be able to sue software companies to recover any potential losses; however, if an operating system would cost $5000 and a web browser $3000, most consumers would simply choose to go back to paper and analog telephones.
- Commercial software companies would have far lower profits. Due to higher prices, their marketshare would shrink; but any added profit from the higher prices would be spent on liability insurance.
- Open-source software would crippled. The grunt work of open-source software is done by vast armies of pennyless students and unemployed programmers. If liability falls onto the individual developer, how many people would want to contribute if they need to take out a $100/month insurance just to submit a five-line patch? And if the liability falls onto the team/foundation, how many developer teams would want to accept contributions from people they don’t personally know and trust? As a result, no large-scale open source movement would be possible.
- The economic basis of a dynamic software industry would be destroyed. Software industry depends on the fact that while writing a product takes some fixed amount of money, distributing any number of copies of the product costs almost nothing. As a result, you get a positive feedback — companies are very strongly encouraged to expand their marketshare. This results in the innovation and dynamism of the software market. But if companies are liable for bugs, distributing an extra copy of a program will cost money: increasing the number of customers means increasing the size of the potential lawsuit, which means increasing the liability insurance premium. Only the largest companies will be able to afford to distribute a piece of software to millions of consumers. It would become much more difficult for a startup company to displace an incumbent.
My personal opinion is that any moves towards forcing software developers’ liability are a part of a long-term strategy by some big software corporations to kill the open source movement and small commercial software developers. Sure, corporate profits would be reduced — but at least, the strategic threat of open source or an upstart taking away your market would be gone!
Developers’ liability are even more dangerous than software patents. Fortunately, unlike software patents, we still have time to stop the evil.